Loudspeakers

There is a school of thought among some loudspeaker buyers that standmount designs are a bit of a waste of time. To be clear, this is not referring to those small speakers mounted on wall brackets or tucked away on a shelf, but rather those that are positioned in their own space on the floor atop a pair of stands.

It’s all very well reading about loudspeakers that employ exotic materials and techniques in their construction, with special driver designs and radical ribbon tweeters, but most of us own models that are basically two or three moving-coil drive units in a fibreboard box with some acoustical damping and a shiny external finish. I’m quite fascinated by affordable loudspeakers.

Few hi-fi components read from a more conflicted job sheet than the standmount speaker. Put yourself inits place. Number one, you need to persuade your owner that, however tempting, being tucked away on a bookshelf isn’t that great an idea if you’re expected to give your best performance. Second, having avoided that dusty corner cosying up to Ian McEwan, the stout pillar you’re now perched on eats up as much floorspace as a floorstanding tower so, yes, the pressure’s on to deliver sonically.

Has hi-fi got better in the past few decades? Take loudspeakers for example; low-cost designs from the seventies were somewhere between dreadful and dire, but improvements in design and manufacturing now make it possible to do so much better.
This point is beautifully illustrated by the new Monitor 300. To be frank, the price has you wondering if the company has inadvertently left off a zero. From a distance it looks like a swanky high-end floorstander – indeed, you could say the same from moderately close up.

A clue might be in the name, but to be honest, it isn’t much of a clue. Fyne Audio. Considerable pun potential apart, a manufacturer with a Scottish HQ seems a fair bet – not unlike legendary Scottish loudspeaker maker, Tannoy. More than just a coincidence? Absolutely.

Producing a concept unit especially for a show or event is a relatively common practise in the car industry, but rather less so in the world of hi-fi. Most companies tend to consider the business of creating items for production to be work enough, but one noble exception is KEF. Having done exactly this with the Muon floorstander, it repeated the process with the Concept Blade, and then managed to get both speaker prototypes into series production.
In the case of the Blade, the result was an extraordinary speaker and one we liked very much.

It is hard to believe that it is now over a decade since Q Acoustics first began selling speakers. As a brand developed under the banner of Armour Home Electronics in 2006, it has successfully managed to swiftly migrate from newcomer to become the new benchmark for entry-level speakers (see our Group Test starting on p24). Even when it pushed its designs slightly upmarket with the arrival of its first Concept models in 2014, it delivered speakers that remain some of the best at their price points today. With barely any speaker markets left to conquer under £1,000, it was inevitable that eventually the brand would move more upmarket.

Having set up shop 30 years ago, the first speaker that Acoustic Energy made has gone on to become its most famous and enduring. The original AE1 was the little speaker that could. What it could do was largely defined by what the considerably older granddaddy of classy compact monitors, the BBC-designed LS3/5A, couldn’t. In other words, it excelled where the seductively mid-neutral old-timer was most obviously compromised – namely in its bass power and extension, loudness and dynamic range.

When is a replacement not a replacement? This slightly abstract question comes about as a result of the loudspeaker you now see before you. When PMC started work on the twenty5 range, the intention was to replace the well-regarded twenty series models. But it very quickly came to the realisation that the speaker it was developing had the potential to be considerably better if the range was repositioned to sit between the twenty series andthe equally lower-case fact range. The result is that the twenty series continues as before with simplified finishes and a reduced price, while the twenty5 series arrives as a range in its own right.

Conveniently, you can count Denmark’s major speaker makers on the fingers of one hand. But while DALI, Dynaudio, Jamo and B&O could all rightly claim to be hi-fi savvy household names in the UK, you’re probably a little less familiar with Audiovector. I’m pretty sure the company’s home town of Copenhagen wouldn’t be quite such a wonderful place without it, though – not least for its highly unusual policy of making upgradeable speakers. Yes, you can send your base level standmount or tower back to the factory for a shot of material fettling so that when you unpack it for the second time, the déjà vu stops when the music starts and it sounds a whole lot better than before.

Trickle down. An expensive, cutting-edge product lends key aspects of its design and tech to a much more modest, affordably constructed and priced item, raising its performance/price ratio and gifting the brochure copywriter some useful ammo to
spin-up a nice little cachet halo. It’s certainly an efficient and logical way of doing business and routine practice for many loudspeaker manufacturers.
But with its new premium Reva range, Wharfedale seems to have turned the whole idea on its head.

When a 90-year-old company has become so famous that its name is synonymous with the things it produces, perhaps there’s a temptation to rest on one’s laurels. After all, everything has been said and done, hasn’t it? Well Dr Paul Mills, Tannoy’s director of development, does not take that view. Indeed, he has just finished work on a substantial revamp of the very thing for which the company is famous – its Dual Concentric driver.
This has given Tannoy its distinctive sound over the years, and does some things better than conventional loudspeakers.

It’s Elac Jim, but not as we know it! I have reviewed countless loudspeakers from this established German company over the years, and been impressed by many aspects of the sound, style and design – but the Debut B6 represents a ‘clean sheet’ loudspeaker by a newly hired acoustic engineer, done in a foreign country at a new price point. How’s that for a change of direction?
Traditionally, Elac loudspeakers have had a distinctively bright, bracing and detailed sound with a delicate and well resolved treble thanks to the innovative and expensive tweeter. However, the new B6 – designedin Cypress, California – sells at a substantially lower price point than the company’s previous wares – at £299 per pair. For this, says designer Andrew Jones, a completely new approach was required that has meant new, bespoke drive units, careful fettling of less exotic cabinets and a meticulous costing of all the component parts to give the best sound per pound.

When thinking of countries that embody qualities of high-end audio, you’d typically mention the UK for refined, understated amps, Italy for craftsmanship, the USA for muscly power and Scandinavia, Germany or Japan for cool, engineered accuracy. Now it’s time to add India to the list for expressive hybrid loudspeakers. Cadence Audio – based in Pune, India – celebrated its 25th anniversary recently by announcing that some of its most celebrated products would be available in the UK. Leading the way are the Avita speakers, considered one of the entry-level products in its hybrid electrostatic range.

There are umpteen wireless speakers around now, but what makes the Air-X 403 interesting is that it’s aimed at serious audiophiles and yet is (relatively) affordable. Startingat £2,499 for these entry-level 403s plus £349 for the base station, there’s also the option of the larger 407 floorstanders for £4,299.
Elac makes very fine loudspeakers and has done some pioneering work especially with tweeter technology over the years. So we’re not talking about a consumer electronics company sticking its wireless tech into any old pair of transducers here! They are effectively active, wireless versions of the highly capable BS 403 passive standmounter.